The transition may have been easier because the aristocracy had no secure control over the local peasantries. There was, in fact, a deep-rooted prejudice against providing any form of regular labour for others. In Homer the landless labourer hiring himself out to others is presented as the lowest possible form of life, only marginally better than death. As a result the mass of the Greek population was never restricted in its mobility, and as population grew this made it possible for larger settlements, towns and cities, to emerge without hindrance, often through the merging of neighbouring villages. When they needed protection the farmers would retreat to local high ground—the Acropolis in Athens, Acrocorinth in Corinth (Greek acros, ‘highest’)—but some Cycladic sites may have been walled as early as 900. The walls of Smyrna, the modern Izmir, for instance, appear to date from 850. By the late eighth century there is the first evidence of paved streets (such as at Phaistos, on Crete). These towns may have taken the cities of the Phoenicians on the coast of the Levant as their model.
It was through this development that the polis (plural poleis), seen by many as the essential social and political unit within which Greek life was to be lived for centuries to come, was born. The polis was, in the first instance, the physical entity of a city, its buildings and the walls around them. Comparisons with other Indo-European languages suggest that the original meaning of the word might be ‘stronghold. Certainly the practice of enclosing these settlements in walls suggests that defence was important. The archaeological evidence, especially from the Cyclades, is growing and over 40 per cent of Greek towns appear to have had walls by the end of the sixth century BC. Yet the polis in its mature form was much more than a defended site. Aristotle, writing in the fourth century, provides the more conventional view that it was a community, living primarily in a city but drawing on the lands that surrounded it for its supplies. The community needs to find ways of governing itself and so ‘politics’. Aristotle was certainly reflecting the busy political life of his day. What is harder to discern is at what point a ‘stronghold’ of the eighth century becomes a political community of the fifth and fourth.
Until recently scholars took at face value the foundation myths of individual poleis that speak as if they had existed as sophisticated bodies of citizens, with buildings to match, from the moment of foundation. The archaeological evidence suggests, in contrast, that the process was much more gradual and these myths are now being seen as later rationalizations of a city’s identity with an idealization of its
Own citizenship. In the eighth and seventh century the polls has a much less stable identity. In many areas of Greece, there were ethne, ‘peoples’, who shared a common identity and culture and may even have held assemblies but did not give any priority to their urban settlements. Sparta always remained a scatter of villages. While agora, open spaces set aside for assemblies, are known from the eighth century, few poleis had the resources before the sixth century to embellish them with civic buildings, and it is only in this century that many aspects of civilized city life such as paved streets and fountains appear.
The increasing amount of evidence from the Dark Age suggests many poleis were actually settlements that had originated in Mycenaean times and had never been abandoned. So they were primarily strongholds that had survived as the most secure centres of population. With the birth of new confidence and prosperity in the eighth century these simply became the focus for expanding urban settlement. Yet there were no mechanisms through which any individual could accumulate great wealth or organize military force against his fellows. Zagora on the island of Andros may not be a typical settlement but its houses were set out on a regular plan and there appear to have been two districts, one on the upper plateau of the site, where buildings are larger than those in the other district, on the slopes below. This suggests an elite but without a dominant leader. So a polls may be an ancient Bronze Age site which grew organically with the rise in population but which had then to work out ways of ruling itself. The evidence suggests that the elite members of the community were often torn between trying to keep their status as an aristocratic class, which transcended the relative parochialism of the city, and negotiating their status as leaders within their community.
The polls is necessarily preoccupied with its identity. It finds a protecting god, Athena for Athens and Sparta, Hera in Samos, Apollo in Eretria (on Euboea) and Corinth. An altar is built to a god or goddess, later a temple, at first on the same model as the aristocratic hall, the megaron, and then more grandly with its own peristyle of columns. An early, eighth-century example is the temple to Hera at Samos. Originally built as a long narrow building with a cult statue housed at the back, it was transformed with a rectangle of wooden columns set on stone bases. The sanctuary is marked by a boundary enclosing the sacred space, the temenos, another word known from the Linear B tablets. The temple becomes the pride of the city, and by the seventh century cities are competing with each other to provide the grandest. The focus on temples rather than on palaces is an important feature of the emerging polls as it shows that political and religious power remain distinct. One of the ways in which the later ‘tyrants’ (see below, p. 166) aim to boost their status is by providing a temple themselves so blurring the distinction.
One of the most important developments of the eighth century is a dramatic increase in the use of religious centres that were remote from any city and totally unconnected with them, among them Delos, the island of Apollo, in the centre of the Aegean, the oracle at Delphi, and Olympia, the home of games every four years. They jealously guarded their independence from any one polls. The neighbouring city of Elis administered Olympia but did not control it while Delphi was
Supervised by a group of cities, the Amphictyony. These shrines played an important part in mediating disputes and releasing class tensions. The oracle at Delphi, dedicated to Apollo, but giving its judgements through a priestess, helped mediate disputes between states and gave its approval to new city constitutions. It had an important role in advising on the settlement of new colonies and often this must have involved dissolving factional tensions by isolating the parties in conflict (sending one of them overseas!). At Olympia the games provided a means by which aristocrats (they alone had the leisure to train) could maintain their status by winning against other members of their class. Surviving dedications on statues found in shrines show that the victors often referred to themselves by their lineage not by their city. Status could also be assured by the opulence of offerings.
As supplicants at shrines and participants in games brought offerings, the archaeological record is rich and the dramatic expansion of these centres in the eighth century is easily plotted. At Delphi, the oracle sacred to Apollo, bronze figurines, presented as offerings, have been found in their hundreds. Only one dates from the ninth century, over 150 from the eighth. The traditional date for the founding of the Olympic Games is 776 bc although there appear to have been festivals to Zeus on the site much earlier than this. The eighth century saw a vast increase in the number of dedications, especially in the form of bronze tripods.
The rise of the pan-Hellenic shrines goes hand in hand with the increasing mobility of the age—the Greek world was expanding fast in the eighth century and the consequences for the maturing of Greek culture were immense.
World History
